- “Detachment means letting go and nonattachment means simply letting be.”
- “Don’t cling to your self-righteous suffering, let it go. . . . Nothing is too good to be true, let yourself be forgiven. To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well.”
- “Simply touching a difficult memory with some slight willingness to heal begins to soften the holding and tension around it.”
- “Letting ourselves be forgiven is one of the most difficult healings we will undertake. And one of the most fruitful.”
- “If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”
- “Those who insist they’ve got their ‘shit together’ are usually standing in it at the time.”
- “If there is a single definition of healing it is to enter with mercy and awareness those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay.”
- “You have to remember one life, one death–this one! To enter fully the day, the hour, the moment whether it appears as life or death, whether we catch it on the inbreath or outbreath, requires only a moment, this moment. And along with it all the mindfulness we can muster, and each stage of our ongoing birth, and the confident joy of our inherent luminosity.”
- “We are motivated more by aversion to the unpleasant than by a will toward truth, freedom, or healing. We are constantly attempting to escape our life, to avoid rather than enter our pain we, and we wonder why it is so difficult to be fully alive.”
- “When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.”
- “How soon will we accept this opportunity to be fully alive before we die?”
- “I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground.”
- “There is nothing noble about suffering except the love and forgiveness with which we meet it. Many believe that if they are suffering they are closer to God, but I have met very few who could keep their heart open to their suffering enough for that to be true.”
- “Until we find out who was born this time around, it seems irrelevant to seek earlier identities. I have heard many people speak of who they believe they were in previous incarnations, but they seem to have very little idea of who they are in this one. . . . Let’s take one life at a time. Perhaps the best way to do that is to live as though there were no afterlife or reincarnation. To live as though this moment was all that was allotted.”
- “I have seem even those who have long since abjured God die in grace. . . . Atheists don’t use their drying to bargain for a better seat at the table; indeed they may not even believe supper is being served. They are not storing up ‘merit.’; They just smile because their heart is ripe. They are kind for no particular reason; they just love.”
- “That which is impermanent attracts compassion. That which is not provides wisdom.”
- “Clearly, all fear has an element of resistance and a leaning away from the moment. Its dynamic is not unlike that of strong desire except that fear leans backward into the last safe moment while desire leans forward toward the next possibility of satisfaction. Each lacks presence.”
- “I have never lived a life so much larger than death.”
- “Relate to the fear, not just from it.”
- “Concepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual.”
- “Our life is composed of events and states of mind. How we appraise our life from our deathbed will be predicated not only on what came to us in life but how we lived with it. It will not be simply illness or health, riches or poverty, good luck or bad, which ultimately define whether we believe we have had a good life or not, but the quality of our relationship to these situations: the attitudes of our states of mind.”
- “Death is perfectly safe.”
- “God is not someone or something separate but is the suchness in each moment, the underlying reality.”
- “In Chinese, the word for heart and mind is the same — Hsin. For when the heart is open and the mind is clear they are of one substance, of one essence.”
- “…forgiveness is not a condoning of the unskillful act which has caused injury, but a touching of the actor with mercy and loving kindness.”
- “…healing comes not from being loving but from being itself. It is not a case of being clear but of clear being. This healing is not about anything else but being itself. Nothing separate, no edges, nothing to limit healing. Entering, in moments, the realm of pure being, the gateless gate swings open– beyond life and death, our original face shines back at us.”
- “It is not for the concept, but for the experience, that we use the term the Beloved. The experience of this enormity we falteringly label divine is unconditioned love. Absolute openness, unbounded mercy and compassion. We use this concept, not to name the unnameable vastness of being– our greatest joy– but to acknowledge and claim as our birthright the wonders and healings within.”
- “We walk through half our life as if it were a fever dream, barely touching the ground, our eyes half open, our heart half closed.Not half knowing who we are, we watch the ghost of us drift from room to room, through friends and lovers never quite as real as advertised.
Not saying half we mean or meaning half we say, we dream ourselves from birth to birth seeking some true self.
Until the fever breaks and the heart can not abide a moment longer as the rest of us awakens, summoned from the dream, not half caring for anything but love.”
What Jesus Reveals To Us About Forgiveness
September 7, 2024
